Yes indeed!
Jon

--
Jon Hughes
(+49/0)1757929098
Sent without the use of Apple products.

---- Daniel M. Himmel, Ph. D. schrieb ----

Dear JL,

Years ago, this was a common problem when I was crystallizing myosin
constructs for my doctoral work.  Some of the most beautiful crystals I
got showed little or no diffraction.  Often this occurs when there is a very
large water content in the asymmetric unit and in proteins that have a
great deal of intrinsic disorder.  Jon's suggestion to flash-cool them in
oil could work.  Your high PEG concentration in the flash-cooling solution
might work, too, but you probably cannot just plunge your crystals
suddenly into a much higher PEG solution.  A few suggestions:

1) Whichever cryoprotectant you use, introduce it to your crystal GRADUALLY,
such as in steps (e.g., 10% ==> 15% ==> 20% ==>25%) or something like that.
For some proteins, drastic rapid changes of concentrations of anything in
the solution can damage the crystal and introduce enough disorder so that
the protein crystal will not diffract well.  Sometimes you can tell when there's
damage if the crystal cracks (or melts away), but not always.

2) You may have to experiment with different cryoprotectants.  Different
cryoprotectants make different protein crystals happy.  For example, try PEG 
200,
PEG 400, PEG 600, glycerol, sucrose, trehalose, other disaccharide sugars, MPD, 
butanediols.

3) I have found that, as a "rule of thumb", 25% of any cryoprotectant is enough
to protect against ice formation.  If your protein crystal can tolerate it, 
higher
concentrations could be better (because they can shrink the unit cell and reduce
some of the water content).  HOWEVER, many protein crystals will not tolerate
much higher concentrations without taking on damage.

I hope this helps.

-Daniel

On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 9:45 AM, ferrer 
<jean-luc.fer...@ibs.fr<mailto:jean-luc.fer...@ibs.fr>> wrote:
Hi

Did you try them at room temp, in situ (straight in the plate). We observe that 
time to time on our beamline, when just harvesting, not mentioning cryo 
protection, is enough to loose all diffraction. It-s rare but happens.

Regards

JL

On 14/08/2018 11:58, Careina Edgooms wrote:
I got the most beautiful crystals I have ever seen and they don't diffract at 
all. Not poor diffraction, NO diffraction. Anyone know why this could be and 
how I can go about fixing it? I had three beautiful crystals and not one 
diffracted. I did leave them in the drop for about 3 weeks before harvesting 
and in liquid nitrogen for about a month before diffracting. Could that be a 
factor? If I regrew more beautiful crystals and diffracted straight away could 
that help?
Careina

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--
--------------------------------
Jean-Luc Ferrer
Institut de Biologie Structurale
71 Avenue des 
Martyrs<https://maps.google.com/?q=71+Avenue+des+Martyrs&entry=gmail&source=g>
CS 10090
38044 Grenoble Cedex 9 - FRANCE

Ph.:  +33 (0)4 57 42 85 22
Cell: +33 (0)6 89 45 13 57
email: jean-luc.fer...@ibs.fr<mailto:jean-luc.fer...@ibs.fr>
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